A collection of scriptural meditations from Saints and Fathers of the Church.

Control your appetites before they control you.

Being delivered from bodily sins is not enough, we must also cleanse the inner energy which dwells in our souls.

Sin disfigures a man, while grace brings beauty.

The man who has come to loathe sin has mounted the first rung of the heavenly ladder.

When tested by some trial you should try to find out not why or through whom it came, but only how to endure it gratefully, without distress or rancor.

If you feel no pang in committing minor offences you will through them fall into major transgressions.

Every man who has committed sin, has stopped up the senses of his soul with the mud of pleasure.

Self-control and strenuous effort curb desire; stillness and intense longing for God wither it.

Grace always precedes temptation, as if to notify you saying, 'Prepare yourself and lock your doors.'

As work according to God is called virtue, so unexpected affliction is called a test.

Let us not put off from day to day, without observing how sin is injuring us.

For never is a man forced into sin by another’s fault, unless he have, stowed away in his heart, matter for evil deeds. Nor is a man to be held a victim of sudden deception if at the sight of a woman’s beauty he fall into an abyss of vile lust. Rather is it that diseases of soul, deeply hidden away and lost to view, come then to the surface on the occasion of the sight.

'And forgive us our debts as we also forgive our debtors.' For we have many sins. For we offend both in word and in thought, and very many things we do worthy of condemnation; and 'if we say that we have no sin' (I Jn. 1:8), we lie, as John says...The offenses committed against us are slight and trivial, and easily settled; but those which we have committed against God are great, and need such mercy as His only is. Take heed, therefore, lest for the slight and trivial sins against you, you shut out for yourself forgiveness from God for your very grievous sins.

Just as desire and rage multiply our sins, so self-control and humility erase them.

Keep the commandments, and you will find peace; love God, and you will attain spiritual knowledge.

Unless a man keeps the commandments of God, he cannot progress, even in a single virtue.

There is a sin which is always 'unto death' [1 Jn 5:16]; the sin which we have not repented. Even a saint's prayers will not be heard for the unrepented sin. The person who repents correctly does not imagine that his sins are cancelled through his own effort; but knows that through this effort he makes peace with God.

Sin, to one who loves God, is nothing other than an arrow from the enemy in battle. The true Christian is a warrior fighting his way through the regiments of the unseen enemy to his heavenly homeland.

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Archangel Michael Orthodox Church
5025 E. Mill Rd
Broadview Heights, Ohio 44147

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[email protected]
440-526-5192 (Phone)